Advent - Preparing to Receive Christ Anew

Come on a spiritual retreat with us through these Sundays of Advent and seek what God has to say to us for our world today.

Kolleen's inspiration to reflect on God's message for this season comes from these books:

Walter Brueggemann, Celebrating Abundance.

Magrey deVega, Awaiting the Already.​

December 16, 2018 - What Christ Came to Do

OLD TESTAMENT READING Isaiah 65:17, GW17 I will create a new heaven and a new earth. Past things will not be remembered. They will not come to mind.

NEW TESTAMENT READING Matthew 11:2-11, NLT2 John the Baptist, who was in prison, heard about all the things the Messiah was doing. So he sent his disciples to ask Jesus, 3 “Are you the Messiah we’ve been expecting, or should we keep looking for someone else?”

4 Jesus told them, “Go back to John and tell him what you have heard and seen— 5 the blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is being preached to the poor.” 6 And he added, “God blesses those who do not fall away because of me.”

7 As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began talking about him to the crowds. “What kind of man did you go into the wilderness to see? Was he a weak reed, swayed by every breath of wind? 8 Or were you expecting to see a man dressed in expensive clothes? No, people with expensive clothes live in palaces. 9 Were you looking for a prophet? Yes, and he is more than a prophet. 10 John is the man to whom the Scriptures refer when they say,

‘Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, and he will prepare your way before you.’

11 “I tell you the truth, of all who have ever lived, none is greater than John the Baptist. Yet even the least person in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he is!

SERMON What Christ Came to Do

What do you expect for Christmas? We are long beyond the age to send our wish list to Santa, though we may have shared it with a family member or a friend. You may have expectations of where or what you will eat for dinner. You have expectations of how you will prepare and how you will celebrate. Some of your expectations will go exactly as planned, and some won’t. But it will be the little surprises of the holy days that you will cherish later. It will be the card or poinsettia you didn’t expect to receive, the visit or phone call that delighted you, the carolers you heard or even the stranger you helped. Plans and expectations are great, but sometimes the surprises are even better. It was like that with Jesus.

There were among the Jews expectations of what Christ, God’s anointed, Messiah would come to do. Some expected a king to continue the royal line of David. Scriptures said it poetically. “A shoot will come out of the stump of Jesse” (Isaiah 11:1) This was understood to mean that someone would be born in the family line of King David whose father was Jesse. The prophets spoke of one coming to sit on David’s throne to reign with justice and righteousness and establish a kingdom of peace that would never end. Even Gabriel said to Mary, “The Lord God will give him the throne of David his father. 33 He will rule over Jacob’s house forever, and there will be no end to his kingdom.” (Luke 1:32b-33) But by the time Jesus was born David’s throne was long gone. Their king, Herod the Great, was a worship God or care for God’s people. The Jews weren’t looking for that kind of king, and their memory of King David was more legend, a rosy gold cultural memory and maybe not the whole truth.

Because of King Herod and the Roman occupation, some Jews, particularly the Zealots, were expecting God to send a fighter who would lead a rebellion to overthrow the Romans and kick them out of Judea. Perhaps they wanted someone more like Judah (AKA Judas) Maccabeus and his priestly father, Mattathias, who led the revolt against the Seleucid Empire of Antiochus IV and those Hellenized Jews who supported him. Stories from that Maccabean revolt, the cleansing of the Temple and restoration of worship is what is celebrated by Hanukkah. We know that revolt against the Roman occupation was Judas Iscariot’s expectation of Jesus.

However, Jesus was different. There’s no getting around that! He was not what was expected, not as God’s anointed, not as a king, not even as a rebel. Jesus didn’t come as royalty or a scholar or a politician or a commander. Jesus came as a commoner, a teacher who knew carpentry and hung out with fishermen and tax collectors. As a literal translation of John 1:14 reads, he put on flesh and tabernacled among us. Tabernacle refers to a tent. In other words, Jesus pitched his tent on our battlefield and joined our human struggle as one of us, and yet as more than us. Jesus came with the knowledge and power and authority and vision of God. We do not have those things on our own, but Christ offers to share them as he invites us to come. We have only to stretch out our hand in response, get up on our feet and follow him.

If Jesus was not what some expected, what did Jesus come to do? We need to remember that even if some Jews had picked up their own interpretations, going back to the scriptures themselves still provides the clearest answer which Jesus himself would point out. Isaiah expected the One sent by God to be filled with God’s Spirit and to come with wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and fear of the Lord. The One who comes from God could be expected to know and share God’s vision for creation and humanity with it. We could expect that One to have the wisdom and power to achieve God’s vision, to know God’s heart but also to understand our human way of thinking and our weakness for temptation. We could expect that One to love and reverence God leading us to do the same.

We had the sense when John the Baptist preached repentance in the wilderness that he believed what God revealed, that this One was his own cousin, Jesus. But months later, in Herod’s prison, John begged for reassurance that his message and his declaration had not been in vain. He sent his own disciples to inquire, “Are you the One we have been expecting? Or should we look for another?” (Matthew 11:3) It may shock you to consider John the Baptist as having doubts. But it makes sense to me that at the end of life or at certain other stress points along the way we may look at how we have lived or what we believed and wonder if we did it right. Why would John be any different; he was human just like us?

Jesus responded by asking John to examine the evidence. Did Jesus fulfill the expectations Isaiah had set forth in other prophetic proclamations, that the blind would see and the deaf hear, the lame would leap, that captives would be released, that Good News would be preached to the poor. These expectations Jesus set forth as his mission. Was it happening? As we read the stories from the gospels, we know the answer is yes.

Jesus asks John, what do you see? What do you think? Jesus asks the same of all of us throughout time. Don’t believe just because someone told you to believe. Look at the evidence, but not just in the Bible, the witness of the past. Look at your own life and the lives of those around you. Do you experience Jesus with skin on in anyone today? Do you see evidence of answered prayer? Does the work of transforming hearts and lives continue? Does healing of body, mind and spirit still happen? Is there any justice, mercy or kindness in the world? Then Jesus is still at work among us!

We can also continue to ask, what do you expect to see and hear? I realized maybe people don’t come to church to listen to preachers, because they already know what they expect us to say. I might think that way myself, if God hadn’t insisted I become a preacher. There are many preachers and teachers who speak to me through their books or their video presentations. However, there are also other voices I hear as prophetic: musicians, poets, dancers, artists. There’s a South Korean rap artist through whom I perceive God’s voice not only in the lyrics of his music, but through a letter he posted online for fans last Memorial Day or through his UNICEF speech at the United Nations. In his band’s message to Love Yourself before you can authentically love others, I hear an echo of Jesus quoting the Old Testament, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39)

Jesus came to bring something new into being, just as Isaiah had said long before, to create a new heaven and earth. I think that is not so much a new physical place for the future as it a new way of life here and now leading to the future. That is why the former things cannot dominate our minds. If we focus on the past, we won’t be open to God’s vision for the future. But as we await something new without knowing exactly when or what or how, we may also lose confidence.

We can’t put God on our timetable, but we also can’t ignore God’s intentions. Brueggemann’s devotion on this topic challenged me. For example, there are those among Christianity who try to read a timeline into Revelation, so there have been debates between pre-millennial and post-millennial theories. I’ll be honest that doesn’t interest me in the least. For me those phrases are better suited to mean before or after the year 2,000 rather than a theological stance on eschatology. Even as I banty those words about some of you wonder what I’m talking about. For some of us such debates are irrelevant.

Here’s the truth I do see. We live between Christ coming once and Christ coming again. We live between Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22. We live between the paradise of Eden or the paradise of heaven, between birth and eternal life after death. We cannot realistically live in the past or in the future. We have nowhere to live but between, for that is where the here and now exists.

The journey from paradise lost through our chaos to paradise reborn is not determined by humans alone. The winds of change come with ruah, meaning wind or breath, God’s breath as we identify the Holy Spirit. When the ruah blows over the chaos, as we read in Genesis 1, the world is re-created. That breath of God was in Jesus and blew through the disciples at Pentecost. God’s wind still blows over the chaos in us and in our world to re-create us and to give life to that stump of a faithful community which sometimes seems dead. Out of our decay, God can still bring new life if we are willing to let go, to be caught in the whirlwind, and trust God to set us refreshed and renewed in a new world where hope comes true. The Spirit blows over the embers of our passion to bring the flame back to life. Perhaps for now only artists and poets can imagine it, but God awaits all God’s plans to be fulfilled and for that stump to grow again and bear fruit.

In one of this week’s devotions, Brueggemann shared views that some hold of God or heaven to which I had strong reactions. I know there have been and still are people who believe that God is either dead or irrelevant. I never thought the God issue is closed as one person put it. I believe God is on-going and still in the process of creating, in other words that God is still actively involved in our world every day and always will be. For me heaven is not closed, nor is it empty as some might claim. I don’t think of heaven as a physical or future place, but as a spiritual dimension where we meet God, just as Moses went up the mountain or into the tabernacle to meet with God. A particular location may aid you in focusing your attention on the spiritual world that surrounds us, but the point is not the location, it’s opening yourself to meet with God. If that heavenly realm is where humans are invited to live with God, then heaven is hardly irrelevant.

Brueggemann suggests that for some… (and don’t be too shocked by this, but listen to what he means) for some, God is a capitalist consumer with an insatiable appetite, meaning that God wants what God wants, and it’s our job to provide it. If there really are people who have created that self-projected image of God, I pity them. I wouldn’t believe in that fake god either. But I can see that as people wrestled in the past or struggle in the present with the greed or lust of power-hungry authorities that rise in any society from time to time, it would be easy to suspect that God is like that, too. However, our God is the opposite of a self-serving, greedy or demanding consumer. Our God is instead a self-emptying, generous giver of all good gifts in abundance far beyond most human recognition. That is some of the good news Jesus still brings to the poor! God and heaven and kingdom are NOT what we imagined from the stereotypes of the world and society around us.

If you ask me what the new thing is that God wants to bring to us, I would say it’s a set of values that are very old and dear, but that the world often loses along the way. I believe God’s vision includes justice with mercy and forgiveness. I believe God wants kindness and respect to be a foundation for peace. I believe God wants us to care for other forms of life, to nurture and restore what we can of the environment. I believe God wants compassion to flow from us like a healing rain, so that hope and healing can blossom and bear fruit. That would look like paradise to me.

Here’s what is needed for that to happen: First, dare to believe that God is still at work in our world re-creating in and through us a new day. Second, repent, literally turn away from the old ways of the world and turn toward God’s vision. Third, come and follow; join a new way of living out God’s intentions.

That change comes one person at a time. We cannot change others, but we can choose to change ourselves. I watch a show that travels to various places around the world and sometimes showcases environmental issues. For example, in Chile or Antarctica where the ice cap is melting or this week in the Maldives where the coral reefs and dying and as the waters sink the islands of the Maldives are disappearing. One explorer recognized that he could not change the entire situation, but he could change his own way of doing things toward a healthier world.

Please know each of us can only do our part and live as witness to this coming of the kingdom of God. It’s an invitation, not coercion. We each have a choice, but the choices of many will affect the direction of society in general. We can choose to continue to live a greedy, selfish, pleasure-seeking, addicted, power and status-hungry way of life as the world often presents to us. Or we can tip the balance toward a healthier, more compassionate and caring way of life for all people and all creation.

Advent asks us to make these choices. Advent asks us to hear the stories of our past as God’s people, and to see where we went wrong at various times in our history. Advent asks us to look at the world around us now and honestly, objectively view not just the world, but our own attitudes and participation in society. Advent asks us to repent where we have gone astray from God’s intentions, to turn back to God’s vision, to change the world by first asking God to change us. Advent asks us then to live with hope and faith, to celebrate peace and joy and love wherever we find them, to be prophets pointing to God’s kingdom wherever it is evident. Advent asks us to prepare ourselves and witness to others, just as John the Baptist once did, that God comes to live among us.

We prepare with anticipation for the ways Jesus will continue to come and to work in our world. Some of our expectations will go exactly as planned and some won’t. There will be surprises along the way, but some of those surprises of how God chooses to work among us will bring the most delight and be the very things we cherish. God does not work according to human agendas, but invites us to turn, to come, and to participate in God’s vision for this world God is still re-creating. That, my friends, is good news worth celebrating!

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